A much longer time seems to have passed since my last post than I actually wrote it, like half a year or so, or more like a few years … I am afraid this time my blog is actually “folding in” – as I thought it would a few times, so I cannot be sure. But I have reasons to believe this time might be serious.
So, for diverse reasons the usual summer break comes in handy – especially for complicated theoretical thinking to cease entirely. In case I might want to refer to them again, I’ll set down two interesting things that happened in the fictional world before departing into my rather dreary-looking holidays or for good. They provide personal answers to a question that I was always extremely interested in and very unsure about most of the time: the key question about the relationship between fictional text and (my) reality. Plus they have both to do with “Shakespeare”. At the moment, I am neither really interested in nor delighted by them, but “Shakespeare” turned and turns out extraordinarily tenacious. When everything good is gone, there will probably still be a little “Shakespeare” sticking to my shoe.
The first occurrence has only a marginal connection with “Shakespeare”, but without Shakespeare 2.0 I would never have undertaken something so tedious as to work myself through the whole “Decameron” from start to finish. The initial motivation was to find out some more about the stubbornly unyielding “Cymbeline”, as it was one of these stories where Shakespeare got his main plot from. And I thought it might be a good thing – having nothing REALLY interesting to do - to continue with Holinshed as the “history” behind the plays and the “Decameron” as one of the main fictional works at the time for writers to get their stories from. But the whole plan began to look like this doctoral thesis again, which makes me instantly want to say not a word more about it …
What made it immediately interesting for me, though, was that I had virtually nothing else to read and therefore read it on an empty head, so to speak, which gave it a lot of space to expand and work on my general mood and frame of mind. Gritting my teeth, I worked my way through an endless succession of lecherous clerics and cruelly betrayed husbands, not really trying to get into a frame of mind to be entertained by this kind of thing … This was the one side of two I recently learned to discern about historic fiction: the chasm that separates the minds for whom these stories were written from mine. A difference I am always guiltily conscious not to take sufficiently into account when I am dealing with “Shakespeare”. There is a reason for it that will become relevant in my second experience, but there is also a real difference in psychological depth and a genuine interest in human relationships that makes “Shakespeare” often so immediately accessible to us. Or AS OFTEN AS NOT, as I should say, which is at the bottom of the problem I have with plays like “Cymbeline” and the comedy part of “Shakespeare” in general. A lot of it just feels “medieval” to me – in the way the “Decameron” does. But the other part, the one where I am surprised by this strange kinship, or notice these sudden changes towards a modern frame of mind, was, in this case, the more disagreeable.
I don’t believe that I would have bothered to read it all but would have contented myself with random samples if I had not worked myself through the incredibly long, realistic and detailed description of Florence during the great outbreak of pestilence that serves as an introduction to the stories. A rich elite of young people, partly with amorous relationships, decides to withdraw from this scene of horror, where everybody has lost loved ones, and repair to a luxurious, beautiful country resort where they have nothing to do but to enjoy themselves, sing and dance and tell stories to provide entertainment. And this was the bit where I immediately connected - by FEELING GUILTY! Because this is what “we” WEIRD people do, being confronted with a depressing reality – like the one we are currently confronted with! (As “rich” is the relative bit in WEIRD, the country resort is not available but I could probably afford two weeks in Tuscany …) Putin starting a war in Ukraine already was as bad as it gets, but I knew something like this was inevitable for a long time. After what is just happening in the US, though - and what of course WAS happening for a long time as well, not being taken seriously by me! – I landed squarely on the point of depression. Suddenly I could see nothing but dark clouds on the horizon anymore and stopped listening to the news and podcasts, immediately switching to “Harry Potter” instead …Strangely though, this guilty fascination and negative vibes made me more susceptible to the bits where the “Decameron” is decidedly more “modern”, more provocative and “unhinged” than “Shakespeare”. The realistic background situation made me acutely aware of a different social reality: an incredibly rich and cultured urban elite that also allowed a lot more freedom of manners and change of feeling and thinking than there was in other parts of Europe. This is something we partly understand from “Shakespeare” as well where there is a fascination with Italian culture and depravity, as in “Othello”, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”, or “Cymbeline”, but the “Decameron” is partly more extreme. Sometimes to a point where it made my head spin. In particular, there is a totally uncompromising stance on the freedom of sexual love. Love has to win, no matter what, especially where WOMEN are concerned. This appears like such a leap from the more traditional romance in Chaucer, for example, where romantic love is the domain of young men and tends to end in tragedy or punishment. As soon as women are recognized as an equal partner in desire (and story-telling!), there is a lot more that gets freed in its wake. Even if it is mainly satire, there are things that are suddenly possible to be thought and addressed that were impossible to address before – or rather elseWHERE. My two favourites: In one of the stories women protested SUCCESSFULLY against a law made against married women without them having a say in it. Another one shows us a young woman with a husband unwilling to perform in bed who is making up for it with their young and pretty servant. When the husband discovers this, he is neither distraught nor vengeful but chuffed to have an attractive young man in his bed. Turns out – though it is not said in so many words – that the man didn’t suffer from the low sex drive often attributed to elderly husbands but is obviously gay. In the end everybody gets what they want and nobody there to take offence!
My second instance of “extreme reading” is much more difficult to summarize without discussing it, but I’ll try. It was seeing “Henry V” with Kit Harrington (as Henry) in the Cinema. For once I was so chuffed that Cinema took this up again – after a two years’ break at least – but the whole production was really good as well, in my opinion, especially as it was a MODERN setting which makes the play more immediately accessible, especially for a history play, which was kind of new for me. It was what was least convincing, though, that made it end up in my blog. I don’t think that Kit Harrington was great as Henry – or as a “Shakespeare actor” – but he had an unusual relationship with his character that he based on his own experience with addiction. Some time into the play, I realized that I really, really enjoyed these negative vibes to GET OUT on the stage. It is some time ago that I was last involved with the histories – which generally are my favourites - but “Henry V” and the two parts of “Henry IV” have always been my least favourite, though there has always been a NEGATIVE fascination for which Falstaff appeared to be the natural outlet. At least I appreciated it very much how Simon Russell Beale played him in “The Hollow Crown” as a dark and devious person. This was rather different from what Kit Harrington did because Simon Russell Beale has this incredible natural understanding of CHARACTERS that only great actors have, whereas Kit Harrington, in this case, had taken a deep look into HIMSELF and allowed us to share it, which occasionally turns out equally profitable. In this case it did for me because, without really knowing it, I had an acute (negative) fascination with the dark interior dimension of life already in me and was prepared to accept – maybe for the first time – that it is not just a PART of life – that has to get “exiled” to other people or has to stay beneath the shining surface of success which “Henry V” is mostly about – but that it is a NECESSARY part, the background even for the shining surface being able to shine. It is not that some people occupy the shining surface and the others get shit – though this often is the case. As our reality consists mostly of what we MAKE of things, it is far more complex. Therefore it was a good experience – even though a disagreeable one but kind of comforting nonetheless – to get once more this complexity through “Shakespeare”. At its best it has this effect to make my personal experience appear more relevant.
So – this was easy! And now summer … (I hate my life.)